sunlike, in a light of its own; and he who seeks to illustrate by external and reflected rays alone shuts his eyes to the chief source of its illumination. The first principle which meets my reflections upon Shakspeare is the independence of his imaginative creations of all the incidents which are valuable in the appreciation of most works of genius. We know, indeed, the age and the character of the age in which he lived; but, as if to teach the principle just stated, the materials of knowledge of Shakspeare's personal history have in all important particulars been swept away. We do not even know how to spell his name,―a question of orthography on which recently in England there has been a very animated discussion, occasioned by the discovery of one of the very rare autographs of the poet; and the argument goes pretty strongly to show that the usual way is a wrong way. Of the man Shakspeare we know literally nothing that is of any worth for the exposition of his character as a poet. The letters which made up his name are far less symbolical of the personal existence of a human being than of the creative origin of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear, and Cordelia, or Juliet and Desdemona, and the other realities that rise up in our thoughts at the sight or sound of the word "Shakspeare." From his individual history nothing ever intrudes to disturb the perfect impression made by those inventions into which he seems to have transferred his whole nature,-this self-forgetfulness, this unconscious selfdevotion, bearing witness to the perfection of his creative powers. This transmigration, as it were, of a great poet's spirit into the characters he invents or the ideas he embodies has furnished an eloquent living divine an apposite illustration in expounding the Christian duty of self-sacrifice; and I quote the passage for its reflex connection with the subject now under discussion : "Whatever has been truly excellent among the products of the human mind has sprung from the very same source of all good, both in the natural and in the moral world, the spirit of self-sacrifice. Look, for example, at poetry. The might of the imagination is manifested by its launching forth from the petty creek, where the accidents of birth moored it, into the wide ocean of being, by its going abroad into the world around, passing into whatever it meets with, animating it and becoming one with it. This complete union and identification of the poet with his poem-this suppression of his own individual, insulated consciousness, with its narrowness of thought and pettinesses of feeling -is what we admire in the great masters of that which, for this reason, we justly call classical poetry, as representing that which is symbolical SMALL KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDIVIDUAL. 99 and universal, not that which is merely occasional and peculiar. This gives them that majestic calmness which still breathes upon us from the statues of their gods. This invests their works with that lucid, transparent atmosphere wherein every form stands out in perfect distinctness, only beautified by the distance which idealizes it. This has delivered those works from the casualties of time and space, and has lifted them up, like stars, into the pure firmament of thought; so that they do not shine on one spot alone, nor fade like earthly flowers, but journey on from clime to clime, shedding the light of beauty on generation after generation. The same quality amounting to a total extinction of his own selfish being, so that his spirit became a mighty organ through which nature gave utterance to the full diapason of her notes, is what we wonder at in our own great dramatist, and is the groundwork of all his other powers; for it is only when purged of selfishness that the intellect becomes fitted for receiving the inspirations of genius." The loss, therefore, of biographical information respecting the English Dramatist ceases to be to me a subject of regret, because his genius was not swayed by time, or place, or fortune. It is a small conception which presents Shakspeare to our minds in his individual personality, limited to one tract of the earth, and one tract of time, and to one little island, one little half-century. To the truer thought the idea of Shakspeare comes as the idea of a voice,- —a spiritual voice, mighty and multitudinous, like the ocean's voice in mid-Atlantic, attuned to no age and echoing to no shore;—and, like ocean too, taking its colour from its own unfathomed deep, and not from the soil of the lands it beats upon. I repeat that I know of not a single incident in the obscure story of Shakspeare's life of significancy for the study of his poetry. Yet there has prevailed on this point-naturally, too-an insatiable curiosity, the fruit of which has been the accumulation of as much rubbish as was ever raked into one heap by the industry of one impulse. I would be the last to attempt to brush away a literary tradition, no matter how remote or how frail the testimony on which it rested, did I not detect the feature of a falsehood. In the absence of authentic materials for a biography of Shakspeare, conjecture has been busy, with a licentiousness of speculation which makes it necessary to take the stand of unbelief. It is, of course, not my intention to spend more of your time on this part of my subject, dismissing it as worthless : one or two specimens of this gossip will abundantly serve the purpose. The absurd story of Shakspeare having earned a livelihood by holding horses at the theatre door was originally stated with an imposing array of the oral tradition on which it rested. Its claims to belief may be best judged of simply by quoting that authority. Sir William Davenant told it Mr. Betterton, who communicated it to Mr. Rowe; Mr. Rowe told it to Mr. Pope, and Mr. Pope told it to Dr. Newton, and Dr. Newton told it to a gentleman-probably Dr. Johnson-who told it to a man who, some two hundred years after the alleged event, put it in print in a book, which, I may add, is remarkable for having no less than two falsehoods incorporated in the few capital words of its titlepage. The tradition of Shakspeare's deer-stealing adventure and his consequent flight from a criminal prosecution has a little better claim to belief, but still with several improbabilities which make it safer to leave it to the receptacle of the fabulous. All that is known with certainty of Shakspeare is known to every one. His birth, 25th of April, in the year 1564, at Stratford-upon-theAvon; his youthful marriage; his removal to London, and theatrical career,—an actor, a manager, and a dramatic poet; his return to his native town a prosperous gentleman; his death in the year 1616, on the anniversary day of his birth, and on the selfsame day on which, in a remote region of Europe, the great master of Spanish fiction, Cervantes, breathed his last. In the church in which the child Shakspeare had, no doubt, been trained to worship, his body was buried, beneath an inscription strong with the powers of his pen, and with an active energy to guard for centuries the sanctity of the grave; for, amid all the vapid enthusiasm of Stratford jubilees, and such senseless adoration as led one of his admirers to whitewash the antique bust upon his monument, if ever rash mortal dreamed of transferring the mouldering remains to a prouder mausoleum, there issued, as it were, from the very sepulchre a calm but appalling voice : : "Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear To dig the bones enclosed here. Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones!" In the village church let the honoured dust sleep till its eternal waking in quietness, the stream that sounded on his ear in childhood for ever flowing near. While the genius of Shakspeare has gone, like the ashes of Wiclif's body, scattered first into the Avon, from Avon into Severn, from Severn into the narrow seas, then into the main ocean, and thus dispersed all the world over, the fit place for his perishable body is the grave that first received it; better than a stately sepulchre in the company of England's dead poets, beneath an abbey's roof. In the words of one who knew him in his bodily presence, CALIFORNIA SHAKSPEARE'S EDUCATION. "Under this curléd marble of thine own, Sleep, rare tragedian! Shakspeare, sleep alone!" 101 I have thus purposely disposed in a very cursory manner of the facts of Shakspeare's life. But, while I would avoid the fruitless and illusive process of conjecture founded upon imperfect testimony,-the fitful flash of speculation,—I am not disposed to turn away from this portion of my subject without endeavouring to cast upon it the meek light of imagination. The first twenty-three years of Shakspeare's life-nearly half of his mortal existence, and a precious part of it-were spent in the place of his birth. A good deal of disquisition has been, it seems to me, somewhat vainly expended on the question of his learning, and a general impression has been the result that he was an uneducated prodigy; in support of which opinion is a well-known phrase of Ben Jonson's, attributing to his illustrious contemporary "small Latin and less Greek." Ben Jonson was a scholar of profound classical erudition; and, if we were to take his standard and apply it to the educated community in general, I apprehend that many of us, under his Latin and Greek measurement, might come out with a more diminutive result than that which has been perverted to sanction the opinion of Shakspeare's deficiency. From the respectable condition of his family, and still more from the easy and natural tone of even his early productions, that tone of learning incorporated into the mind which it is so hard for an uneducated man to affect,-I have no doubt that Shakspeare's acquirements, so far from being below the standard of ordinary education, were such as to entitle him to rank among the well-educated, even though afterwards, in his intercourse with the literature of other languages,-the ancient and the foreign, he had recourse to the secondary medium of translation. But how utterly insignificant does such an inquiry become when, turning from the matter of mere tuition, we strive after some conception, imperfect as it must be, of the self-formative process of Shakspeare's mind,—or, to express myself with more truth, the growth of his genius under the various ripening influences given for its development, not less than the implanting of its primal germ and elements! When, reasoning of Shakspeare as of other men, we seek for the ordinary causes which first suggest themselves, to account, for instance, for his power over the language, for his description of the visible outward world, and for that which distinguishes him above all other authors, his knowledge of human nature, his familiarity with the visionary region of the heart,-how inadequate are such causes to explain the wondrous results! To say, indeed, that in early life he was a thoughtful and susceptible observer of all that could enter the avenues of sense, all earthly and all skyey influences,—that he meditated on the hidden wealth of the English language,—that he was a student of the emotions and manners of his fellow-men,-and, more than all, that he held deep and unbroken communion with his own spirit,-would be to assert no more than reason warrants. But reason at the same time tells us that more yet is needed to solve the mystery of the Stratford boy. But it is in vain: nothing is equal to it; there is a depth which neither empiricism, nor experiment, nor observation, nor theory, can fathom. Science is baffled, and all the elaborate statistics of education give no light. Where did Shakspeare gather the stores that he poured forth on an astonished world? Was it at Stratford? was it at London? was it in school?—in the throng of the market or the highway? Was it in each or in all of these? More, more is needed; and, when an inquiry of this kind is instituted, we feel disposed to fall back to the simple belief of the fine image of Shakspeare's childhood in Gray's Progress of Poesy : " . "Far from the sun and summer gale, In thy green lap, was nature's darling laid, Stretch'd forth his little arms and smiled." If the growth of Shakspeare's transcendent powers defies all speculation, there is yet reason to believe that we may trace some influences which gave his genius a direction to the form of dramatic composition. That this is the species of authorship eminently congenial to him is manifest to the least reflective on the unequalled facility with which he transfused himself, as it were, into the very character and life of his inventions. The town of Stratford is known to have been visited, during the opening years of Shakspeare's manhood, by several sets of players in the service of different noblemen, especially the Earl of Leicester, whose name suggests the mention of a fact of some interest, from its probable connection with Shakspeare's boyhood. Between Kenilworth Castle, the residence of that nobleman, and the town of Stratford, the distance is that of but a few miles; and, when the noble residence was lighted with the sumptuous display of the princely festivities with which the visit of the Queen was welcomed by her unworthy and unprincipled favourite, Shakspeare was a youth, in the full flush of his twelfth year; and, amid the theories and conjectures to fill the blank of the unknown story of his life, I know of none more plausible than his presence on that animated occasion. It was a scene |
